Strikes me that the anxiety about digitally mediated communication that is explained as “someone just being able to switch off the conversation at any time” is a dissimulation of a truth of what is appealed to as liberal discourse when said discourse happens in physical proximity (i.e. as dialogue, or conversation). What I mean is, worrying that people can control online discourse and end conversations if they don’t like them is really a worry about who has access to behaviours which express power in discourse. Because in online spaces, (often only temporarily, mind) voices can exist in equal magnitude, or volume. The sound metaphor makes more sense I think.

Politicians, for example, have always committed a rhetorical “switching off” of engagement in sanctioned speech whenever they don’t want to answer a question. It is mocked sometimes, perhaps ridiculed or laughed at. But it’s still, arguably, accepted, and still performs a similar social role to the closing of a chat window. Insert your favourite example: Men talk over women – it is sanctioned by whatever can be squeezed under the umbrella of rational debate. If it happens the other way round the woman is labelled otherwise (“You’re an agitator! A feminazi! Bossy! Nasty!”) Managers ignore the voices of workers, because in their ears the obvious pulse of capital keeps going. It comes down to what you choose to label as noise. I know none of this is new, I’m just saying it again, I was thinking it all again just now – ways of thinking never complete though do they?? they have to keep-

I’d suggest that the notion that technologies of digital mediation create novel conditions for denying discourse, that lots of people are readily using their positions online to create spaces which are hermetically sealed from conflict, opposing views etc is an argument used to fog up the actual conditions of discourse in the liberal state. It’s not like any online space is a playground of joyful agreement, even those which are supposed ideologically homogeneous. And anyway, people looking to find a form of political/ideological agreement in their everyday encounters is hardly a new thing – you do it every fucking day and always did, especially in physical/material/this person in front of me ways. If you don’t like what somebody’s saying and you’re more powerful or privileged, it is in fact very easy to find ways of silencing those people, either literally or by questioning the validity of their speech. And this especially in ssspoken disccourssse! The notion that a prelapsarian world of well-informed citizens and equal and honest debate existed “before the Internet came along” is not only a laughable idea but a dangerous one, because it is used to implicitly validate the silencing of voices (“Don’t listen to anything you read online”; the obstructions and insults directed at any proponent of third wave feminism; “discourse online is uncivil”; online communities are weird; “you can’t have friends you’ve never met in person that’s weird”; “we need to have a proper face-to-face conversation about this” etc etc – – I know Iknow there are problems with this position as a total one, we have to have to challenge the voice which does violence, I’m not trying to suggest some hierarchy of communicative practices. Quite the opposite.)

Modes of digital mediation shows Caliban his face in the mirror –(on the fourth draft read though I feel weird about this loaded/clichéd image but don’t want to take it out for fear of disturbing the sound of the whole thing) -anyway anway- digital mediation shows calibanhisfaceinthemirror by granting some measure of equality (in a micro sense, facebook messenger is not communism) in the control of the on/off status of discourse, the ability to sanction or reject speech, to those who would be otherwise marginalised. When this new (albeit limited) power is lived, performed or acted upon by those in a less powerful position, it upsets those who are better able to perform the physical, spoken on/off discourse. (See: the gendered reaction to a woman opening up challenging or radical positions on Twitter) So the claim starts off that digitally mediated discourse is somehow invalid discourse, because of the uncertainty involved in communication, that lots of people involved in discourse have some ability to perform speech with an equal voice which makes it… cacophonous. Or it goes further, and the very idea of its invalidity is used to further justify a mediated silencing (deleting comments or posts) or what might be called switching-off behaviours (derailing arguments/abuse/long comments designed to finalize and make certain i.e. to indicate by magnitude what kind of speech matters or is allowed).

Aside, can it be said that cacophony exists to be critically thought through or with? All readings are cacophony until they are quieted. When and where do you choose to plug your ears and does your body allow you to plug your ears? Good for you.

The latest example of the naked attempt by power to silence, Trump’s banning of selected news organisations from the White House press briefing, could be read in the context of the above. It is a grab for the power-over-discourse where it can still be unambiguously enacted: a physical location.

If somebody is uncomfortable with the ambiguity of discourse on the internet, or looks to establish a particular form of order on a particular form of mediated speech, it is not due to the novel conditions of speech allowed by those digital technologies. It is due to the person who desires to sanction or silence the speech of others – others whose equality with their voice disturbs them.

“….the idea of infinity is transcendence itself, the overflowing of an adequate idea. If totality can not be constituted it is because Infinity does not permit itself to be integrated. It is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalization, but the Infinity of the Other.”

Emmanuel Levinas – Totality and Infinity

Novels, the ones that are called literary by educational institutions, by the cultural studies and literature departments which reside within them, are constantly concerned by their own adequacy or validity. The death of the novel has become an irritating cliché for anyone trying to do resonant or resistant readings of texts in classrooms or readings groups, or for essays or theses. “We know”, they want to say. Better to say the novel has always been undead, existing in a state of not really existing, vampiric, choose your demonstrative-monster metaphor. I expect this is not my idea.

And a version of this declaration, or description, concerning the status of the novel came to mind when thinking about Levinas’s use of the term adequate. It is in the above quotation from Totality and Infinity that Levinas uses it to suggest the state of an idea which is coherent or complete. An idea founded in the discourse of reason, which can be thought or assimilated, thematized, by the totality of the self. But it seems that adequacy can have multiple senses above. That it is enough or satisfactory – or sufficient. Perhaps satisfactory is suitable given Levinas’s description of solitude as a form of personal enjoyment.

Adequation is also a kind of equivalence or making equal, a coming up to a necessary standard. And this starts me thinking about the “standards” of the literary novel, in the sense that it is both self-regulating and reliant on institutional regulation of its status and value. A novel attempts to be adequate to the very idea of what it means to be valuable/literary but at the same time wishes to critique or disturb the notion that there is a basic idea pertaining to what it is, or what it is meant to be. It wants to be adequate, to just about survive, its own literary status, and in doing so simultaneously display its own anxiety about its literary status. (Derrida’s in this paragraph haunting the vampire.)

Thus there are a bunch of things the novel can and can’t do. It can’t do reality – but it can try and succeed at mimesis. It can do the avant garde, but is hamstrung by a total avant garde novel. It can communicate and “move” people, but it is also complex and requires creative-critical readings. It can show us politics, but also we mustn’t use it to do politics.

It strikes me that digital mediation – chat logs of characters interacting, characters trying to google, characters at a screen – is something which shows up this necessary inadequacy of the novel. The literary needs to keep the digital as a text separate, in order to bolster its status as a singular form of textuality, to preserve the kind of temporary, quantum totality it need to simultaneously establish and not establish. At the same time, the literary novel has to assimilate different forms of mediation, as it has always done, in order to acknowledge its ability to try and do reality, or to maintain its own vitality.

But the act of digital mediation contains a difficulty which amplifies the novel’s inadequacy. It contains within it an encounter with exteriority, an infinity, with the volume turned up; mediation lit up with the problem of the other as the absent-but-present glow through the screen. The novel attempts to assimilate this, like other forms of textuality which were embedded in it from the beginning (letters, diaries, ships logs) but in doing so demonstrates an impulse to make it the same, the make it something the novel can deal with or thematize. The “infinity” presented on multiple levels by the event of digital mediation ultimately troubles the novel not only because it does not permit itself to be integrated, in that it is a formal and structural interruption. Its interrupting capacity is also the interruption of the problem of mediation which is the anxiety of the novel itself. It shows the literary a mirror, and within it is contained the necessary inadequacy of the form. It makes possible a reading of the anxious crisis of the novel.

This doesn’t kill the novel, put the stake through the heart of the vampire in its institutional coffin, but it sprinkles holy water around the castle as a constant reminder. To talk of the novel as dead is to claim that it was ever alive to begin with. And to suggest that digital textuality is “virtual” or easily reducible to a negative version of subjectivity is to engage in a line of thinking which denies the primordial status of mediation as a condition for all discourse. The recognition of this inadequacy, though, can make for the continuation of being for others, can drag the novel not from death into life, but make the novel live and die well.